Archive for the ‘B2B’ tag

So many small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t think they need a blog. Blogging takes time and energy that would be better spent focusing on operational concerns or building the business, right? Wrong! The fact is, blogging is one of the least expensive and most effective marketing tools at your disposal

Whether you are selling B2C goods or B2B services, blogging will help you build your business. If nothing else, blogging gives you focus. The blog can become a focal point for your entire marketing program, forcing you to consider brand positioning and customer commitment as you tell your story in each blog post. Blogging keeps your brand fresh for prospects, customers, and employees.

Here are just a few of the reasons your business needs a blog:

Promote your online brand – You can use the company blog as the launch pad for your online marketing program. A well-thought-out blog can support your inbound marketing campaign and your SEO strategy. It also gives you content you can reuse to feed social media channels, LinkedIn groups, Pinterest, and other social media channels. You can even use it in company newsletters and other customer communications.

Establish your market credentials – The company blog is the perfect forum to talk about issues relating to your business and your market, and show the world what you know and why they should do business with you and not the competition. The blog is a soap box you can use to show your expertise about trends, challenges, regulations, and other issues that are important to your customers.

Offer customer support – The company blog also is your forum to engage with customers. You can use the blog to explain what’s going on with the company, share good news, and bad, or to apologize for a problem. It provides a place where you can talk to customers in a more personal way, and show that the company cares in a very public way.

Lead generation – You never want to use a blog as an overt advertising platform, but you can use it to engage with customers and talk about innovations, new products, and new trends. If you can engage with customers without a sales pitch, they will continue to follow you until they are ready to become customers.

Build brand trust – Blogging promotes engagement with customers and interaction builds familiarity, and trust. By talking to your target market regularly you are building an online relationship; you become familiar. So when the time comes to making a buying decision, consumers will remember that relationship when they buy. They think first about brands they know and trust.

We know that blogging can be time consuming, and many executives don’t like to write. So just outsource it – that’s why we’re here. We can help you create a warm and friendly blog that puts the right face forward for your company, and engages with consumers so they keep coming back. Let us help you tell your story and show you how to make the most of a corporate blog.

Good content drives meaningful conversation with customers

Good content is crucial in a web-driven market. You need to participate in the conversation of the Web to engage with your customers. Good marketing is a product of good storytelling. You need to connect with customer in a way that resonates and creates a compelling reason to do business with you (or at least give you a second look) as opposed to the other guy. That’s why good content means more business.

Having a meaningful conversation with your customers means you have to have a story to tell. That’s content. Conversation with customers is the result of superior content delivered through the right channels to promote interest. You use content to generate web traffic, and then you use content to convert traffic into leads, leads into prospects, and ultimately prospects into customer. At each step of the sales cycle, it’s the content that tells your story and keeps visitors coming back for more.

And it doesn’t matter if you are targeting consumers of business customers. According to the latest research from the Content Marketing Institute, use of strategic marketing content is on the rise across the board – 54% of B2B marketers are increasing their content marketing spending and 55% of B2C marketers are increasing their content budget. Tactical spending will vary between B2B and B2C programs (as shown in the bar chart), but all marketers agree that social media, blogs, and in-depth articles are where they need to focus their content marketing efforts.

The same studies show that both B2B and B2C content marketers are facing the same challenges:

That’s why many companies are outsourcing content creation – according to the Content Marketing Institute that’s 46% of B2C marketers and 44% of B2B marketers.

That’s why content matters, and that’s why we are providing a new resource to support content marketing programs. We understand storytelling, and how to engage customers and prospects with messages that speak to their needs and concerns. And we can usually create expert content faster, and more cost-effectively than in-house resources.

The ongoing challenge with any marketing program is creating fresh content to keep the program going. That’s why more organizations turn to experts like Write On Content for fresh material to feed their programs.